


Thaw (of the heart and other great bodies of water)

by missfortunerest



Category: Snowpiercer (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse Fix-it, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Edgar is a little shit, Gilliam is too, Headcanon, M/M, Wilford is Evil, because i wanted one, consuming waste products, desperate times and all that, minor homophobia, so lets get all matrix up in here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-08 22:47:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1958976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missfortunerest/pseuds/missfortunerest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Curtis hadn't opened his eyes to change for seventeen years and yet as he lay in his bunk, sleepless in the eternal night of the Tail, he felt the ever present hum of the Engine slow to a grinding, impossible stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thaw (of the heart and other great bodies of water)

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know about you but at the end of the movie I was like a) I want 7 of Grey b) two arms to hold a woman is a weird no homo c) Chris Evans with a beard tho. Combine that with the amazing escaped Inuit woman and too much time on my hands overthinking movie political policies (really, would they not have done crazy troubleshooting of CW-7 in the SEVEN YEARS it was being touted as the end to global warming) and you get as happy an ending as Snowpiercer allows. Still AU but whatever.

Curtis lay perfectly still in his bunk, careful to prevent it from rocking lest he wake Edgar again. He would have thought growing up on this Train would make anyone a heavy sleeper but Edgar remained capable of waking at the slightest creak of Curtis’ wooden bunk. So perhaps he wasn’t a light sleeper at all, but one with a highly developed awareness of Curtis, as if he would even leave Edgar in the night. He’d never—nowhere to go and no place in the whole wide Train he would rather be. Sighing inaudibly, he worked his hand across his buzzed scalp, the steady whirr of the Train trying to lull him back to sleep.

In the beginning, when food was newly gone and the only beverage available came out of your own dick, that rattling hum was a godsend. Ever present, it kept the majority of passengers who were otherwise irritable from being packed like sardines against strangers, in a stupor that pushed off the killing for a week at least, a week of near catatonic sleep and desperate story telling. Curtis had found himself wedged between a waifish old man, Greg from Louisiana, and a chick named Trixie whose knife was the one tucked beneath his pillow now. Greg hadn’t lasted long at all, Curtis suspected he had been sick long before coming aboard the Train, but in his fever-addled mumblings he would always promise Curtis that this ain’t bad at all, had it worse than this all the time on Earth, this ain’t hunger. It was comforting.

He died in the first week.

Not by his sickness, though Curtis was sure that that would have done him in in the end, but in the light of fluorescent ‘day’ his life ended with Trixie’s knife in his heart. Every day of Greg’s mumbling had added another measure of tension to Trixie’s spine and Curtis had become steadily more wary of the knife clutched tight in her gloved hand. He knew that she could, would use that knife one day. Every passenger had stepped onto the Train in New York City but the walks of life that lead there, to these tightly packed compartments, were wildly different. Trixie was hard in a way that he wasn’t, like she would have beat off the artificial winter with her bare fists if she hadn’t made it onto the Train.

He and Trixie had only seemed to have one long conversation, broken by sleep and hunger, but all the same thread. She’d always sigh before asking him a question, like she was doing him a huge favor.

“So where are you from, Baby Blues.” She never said anything like a question.

Curtis replied in kind, “Born in New York, out of Manhattan. Far out in the boroughs.”

She smiled, her teeth a bit crooked and caked with plaque. “I knew I smelled a suburbs kid. I don’t know what I’d fucking do if I were stuck out there, seems goddamn suffocating.” She fumbled around in the dark orange winter coat for a cigarette, one of the last in her pack.

Curtis gazed longingly at the cigarette. He didn’t even smoke, but just having something, anything to put in his mouth seemed appealing at this point. He had passed being the hungriest he had ever been within the first day and now he was worried that his stomach was going to digest itself for something to eat.

He shifted against the wall, sometimes is helped the gnawing of his stomach. Most times it didn’t. He sighed, “It was boring and suffocating but you could do a lot worse—I thought I was escaping when I got a job in the big city, had a place on my friend’s couch too. I thought I was winning against the suburbs, like being well fed and not sleeping on a park bench was something I needed to fix.”

Trixie huffed a laugh and smiled around her lit cigarette. The other smokers in their block gazed at her longingly, hands clenched, either avoiding the temptation of reaching for their own last cigarette or hers. She sneered at them and took an even longer puff, fiddling with her knife in her other hand. “Then what, kid? I can tell your gearing up for a shit sob story.”

Curtis scoffed, “Jesus, watch the language, there are kids in here.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Curtis, that fucking monkey up in the rafters doesn’t give a shit and the only other kid on this side of the Train is you,” she said.

Curtis smiled up at the ceiling where, tucked up in a cross section of pipes, was the youngest person aboard. No one knew his name or where he came from, not an easy feat when there's hardly an inch between you and the next guy. Greg the homeless guy had given the kid his last few potato chips a few days ago and Curtis had to stop himself (and Trixie) from snatching the chips straight out of his hand.

Curtis flicked his eyes back toward Trixie, “Yeah, yeah. And I don’t have a sob story.” At least Curtis didn’t think of it as one. More like the first half of a coming of age story without the optimistic resolution. He pushed himself back up the wall again, running a had through his sun bleached hair.

Trixie hummed, done with the conversation already, and pushed her dirty blonde hair back over her shoulder. It had gotten steadily greasier and more disgusting as the week wore on, but so had everyone else’s. They might have resigned themselves to drinking their own piss but no one was willing to wash their hair with it.

The smell in the compartment had gotten steadily worse, the stink of shit and piss and desperation cloying in his nose. There were two bathrooms, each with an impenetrable crowd surrounding them to relieve themselves into the waterless, and newly toilet paper-less, toilet. Some didn’t even try to push their way through, shitting where they sat.

Curtis had heard through the Train grape vine that one man farther down had tried to eat his own shit and then scavenged through the Train for other peoples. He died the same day as Greg but for arguably more natural reasons.

The day Trixie killed Greg was the first that Curtis had the thought, the one that would haunt him till the end of his days, though he was not the first to have it. He was one of many that, packed close into the corner of the compartment, watched greedily as the knife emerged from Greg’s chest glistening with blood, the wet sound of its release transforming from gruesome to tantalizing. Slowly she brought it to her lips and licked a long stripe down its length.

He didn’t think it was the lick that did it, nor the glorious gleam of anything not the gun metal grey of the walls or the sallow, flaccid skin of an unwashed human, but the moan of pure satisfaction that rose from her as she swallowed, throat bobbing around the blood.

That is when Curtis turned back towards Greg, optimistic homeless Greg, and saw dead flesh and rich blood oozing from his motionless chest and began, very quietly, to salivate, to reach and taste iron and feel satisfaction and reach, to this body, now crowded with hands, to _rip_ and—

Shake awake to Edgar’s hand pulling at his shoulder.

“Come on, man, we’ve got to go.” Edgar continued to pull at him while Curtis turned and took in the calamity in low lighting, his neighbors in the rattling ark all pulsing forward like the blood from—

No. Curtis shook himself, now especially was no time to be getting lost in the past, with the resistance coming soon and whatever disaster this was unfolding before him. He swung down from his bunk, following Edgar for once along the flow of people towards the head count area. He made it all the way to the front of their compartment before registering something was wrong. Reaching out quickly he gripped Edgar by the shoulder, opening his mouth to voice his confusion but Edgar, face tight with terror, cut him off, “You weren’t listening at all, were you mate? Open your ears yah dumbass—what do you hear?”

Curtis took at moment and halted right in the middle of the corridor, stuck still with confusion and fear. The crowd continued to rush forward around him, knocking against him and shouting in multiple languages but none of that registered.

Gob smacked and eyes wide he whispered, “The engine isn’t on, Edgar.”

He swallowed and nodded, “You’re damn right. We’ve stopped moving.”

+++

The armed guards were already at the front of the room, Franco the Elder and the Younger huddled together behind them. Almost two decades of practice made getting everyone into their lines easy as breathing. Curtis settled in with Edgar at his side, Gilliam and Grey coming to stand beside them moments later. The panic slowly growing in the room was crawling along Curtis’ skin like the cockroaches they started to find a few years back. Gilliam is silent beside him, the crags of his face furrowed deeper than usual while Grey settled behind Curtis’s back.

Years ago he would have jumped away from the drag of a finger along his tailbone but now it's comforting, a balm for the terrible worry coursing through him. _Train?_ Grey writes, letters all capitalized for better understanding.

“The Train’s stopped,” Curtis mumbles. He can only imagine what the sudden lack of sound and subtle pull of forward motion feels like for the Train babies. Even he barely remembers a time when the train wasn’t moving.

Beside him Gilliam sighs, nods, and yet remains silent. Curtis follows suit, still too stunned by the stop to even begin to think about what to do now. No one can survive outside, the Train is life. Grey is the only one to respond, pressing his hot hand fully against the small of Curtis’ back. Curtis nods, seemingly to himself, and reaches behind himself to grasp that hand in his own.

Curtis' heart is pounding in his throat, Edgar has yet to stop nervously swallowing, and Gilliam is looking steely towards the guards but Grey’s hand, dry as bone, is one small comfort. Only an event of this incredible magnitude could push them to be so close in front of Gilliam.

Gilliam had been a guide, a mentor, almost a father for them both from the very start. Curtis had found him with hands still dripping in the blood of Edgar’s mother, Greg from the beginning, and so many in between. He had found Gilliam and had his conscious reawakened at the awe inspiring gift of one’s own limb. The blood had gushed like a sick river from Gilliam's arm, a young Grey sliding from behind him to shakily begin stemming the blood flow. Meanwhile Ashanti, a woman from the car over, brought her toddler over, hunching around him protectively, to suck at the blood from the rag covering the old man’s new stump.

It was a twisted miracle but, then again, everything that happened in that month was twisted in one way or another.

Gilliam had whispered, voice wavering through the immense pain, “Now eat, damn you, if you’re so hungry.” and suddenly Curtis was so longer hungry. He passed the arm back, back to his pack, Trixie and Andrew gnawing it indiscriminately. Tanya and Paul began ripping off fingers, passing them around like party favors while the crowd that had been mesmerized by Gillian began to thoughtfully strip apart what used to be a young woman, a young mother.

Curtis fell forward onto his knees. His hands, dirt caked, scratched at his own face and he, for the first time since boarding the Train, felt hot tears drip down his cheeks, so much thinner than blood.

Gilliam had long since stumbled back, still being tended to by the eight year old that had found protection in a fragile old man. He pushed the bundled up kid that he had been about to _consume,_ God he nearly retched, he would never eat again, and he was seeing the baby for the first time, the baby, not the bundle, not so much flesh.

The baby that was standing next to him, tall and strong as he could be on protein bars closer to hospital Jell-O than true food. He had been raised on the teachings of the man who saved his life and the man who sought to end it. He was as much a child of Gilliam and the Train as his long gone mother. Curtis couldn't decide if he wanted to wrap Edgar up in his coat, shielded from the world or push him far away from his bloody hands.

Curtis had strived to live by Gilliam’s words, had lived with his guilt (his _two_ bloody hands) every day for the last seventeen years, but for the clasping of Grey’s hand.

It had been one of the more frequent lectures Gilliam would give to them all, to Trixie the future revolution leader, Grey who would now never speak again, to Edgar who was full of energy and a carefully learned accent, and to Curtis sitting in the back and trying to keep Edgar still. Gilliam would speak slowly, telling them of the balance of things and how they must go forth and right it, reach into the front of the train and remake the status quo. Everything has its place, a woman in a man’s arms, food in the bellies of the hungry, and we must go forward to claim ours.

Curtis never said a word to Gilliam, he respected the man and he never wanted pick a fight with him, but when Edgar came to him with come stains on his pants and teary eyes he explained what it means to grow up and tried to give him that little bit of freedom on this rattling prison. He knows that Edgar has told Grey when three nights later Grey crawls silently into his bunk, crouches over him, shoves his hand beneath Curtis’ sweater, scrawls _Ilikeyou_ and then swings back out into the Train.

In the dark of that night the noose of guilt around his gut had pulled even tighter. This was essentially the child of his mentor, the svelte young man who had haunted Curtis' dreams since Grey had grown into his body at fifteen. Even on this godforsaken Train that made Curtis a sick man. So he pushed it down till he could nod to Grey and see his naked torso, tight and peeping constantly out of his coat, without feeling his heart (and pants) tighten.

The problem was that Grey kept coming back, creeping into his bunk with cat like grace and writing sonnets Gilliam must have taught him into his skin, then jokes that made Curtis huff out laughter that would shake the bed and threaten to wake Edgar. He should have known that his resistance wouldn’t last long when he reached out and traced a reply against Grey’s golden skin. It felt too good for a sick man like him.

In the light of day nothing had changed, they still trained together on occasion, Tanya giving knife throwing lessons while, Edgar, still as energetic as a toddler, chased Tim and tried to get the jump on Grey. He never did but the expression of eye-brow lifted judgment on Grey's face was always a source of amusement. It lit up the small part of Curtis that had frozen in place at seventeen, the idealistic center that craved the warmth he hadn't felt in as many years.

He thanked the God that must have abandoned them all for giving him this small family, scarred but capable of laughter, of smiling in the gloom and grime of the Train.

The guards, clad in dark Kevlar and AK-47s fidgeted at the front of the compartment, their Wilford rings shining nervously. Tanya and Timmy stood to the side tucked up next to Andrew and his boy, their bodies a shield from whatever is about to come. He almost wants to join them, shove Edgar and maybe Grey in between them and take the brunt of the silence on the Train. Instead he squeezes Greys hand, slipping their fingers together, and whispers to Edgar, silent with lips pinched closed, "It’s going to be okay, you hear me, punk?”

Edgar full body twitches and turns back to him, a strained smile growing on his face. “No shite it’s going to be okay. You’re gonna go out there and push the freeze back with a couple fooking barrels?”

Curtis returned his smile as Grey presses _yes_ into his back with his other hand. Curtis huffs a laugh and then falls silent.

Through the window of their gate he could see another regiment of guards coming, Minister Mason’s distinctive form at the front.

What could happen now? Is the train broken beyond repair? Is this going to be his last hours of life before freezing to death? His breath comes out shaky as their gate opens and in walked Mason, repugnant as always, but even from five rows away he could see that something was wrong.

The guards that followed her in were not in the standard uniform, instead in dark green furred jackets.

Mason, grasped firmly at the collar by one of the guards, stuttered over her words even more than usual. Her phlegmy voice choked up as she began, “I don’t know how to tell you this, it is-“ she paused, clearing her throat, "an unfathomable betrayal for all of us, from the, ahem, front to the tail.”

Unlike usual, she looked painfully sincere, her cheeks reddened with the strength of her emotion. Curtis could feel the crowd tensing and Grey’s hand clenching and releasing in his. The panic that had started when the Tail woke to the absence of wheels working was growing around him. He straightened his spine and raised his head, looking over the crowd and directly at Mason, daring her to continue, to tell them that one way or another his family is not going to survive today.

The guard tugged harshly at her collar and she swallowed audibly. “The great and—sorry, perhaps that's not accurate, the, ah, the Wilford has lead us all, well more specifically the tail section, to believe that the release of CW-7 caused an, ah, well to be poetic, eternal winter that killed all life on earth apart from the inhabitants of this wonder-, well, this functional train.”

She tightened up, bracing herself, but rather than being met with vitriol there was only silence. For one crystal clear moment Curtis couldn’t even think. There was only nothingness because this couldn’t, could not, be happening. Instinctively he looked to Gilliam because surely, even if no one else did, Gilliam could help them make it through this. But Gilliam just kept his gaze forward, giving Curtis nothing,  nothing to grab on to.

He was woken from his stupor by Edgar swaying against his side and so Curtis shook himself, he needed to be strong here. If what Mason is saying is true then Edgar who had only ever seen these metal walls—

God. Grey behind him tensed even further and Curtis could feel that he was seconds away from jumping up into the pipes that crisscrossed the ceiling, the safest place on the Train but no, Jesus, they needed to stick together now. Reaching behind him he pulled Grey closer, felt his face pressed tightly into his shoulder, trembling. Curtis wrapped his other arm around Edgar, pulling his loose, uncomprehending body closer.

Rows away Tanya had fallen to her knees clutching little Tim to her, he being too young to understand anything beyond his mother’s distress. Andrew simply stared forward, not towards Mason, not towards anything at all really, maybe at the world he thought was gone forever.

Around him rose a sea of noise, the information given finally being processed. Protests abounded, violent rebuttals to their homes still being alive and well. The world was thrown straight into Winter! We saw it!

Mason tried to shout and whistle over the noise, the guards gripped their guns harder. The crowd got louder, fingers got closer to triggers.

Beside him Gilliam turned, leaning behind Curtis’ back to whisper something to Grey, something too low for him to hear. Grey pulled away from him, as if to follow Gilliam but Gilliam put his one good hand on Grey's head, patting him still, before beginning to come forward, leaning on his crutch. He passed through the rows of their friends and train mates which parted for him, quieting as he went.

Before Mason he stopped and turned, his face reflecting only an odd calm.

“My friends, I am afraid you will not like what I have to say. Please know that it does not please me to say it but, as I suppose is true of most unsavory things, it must be done. When our journey began I did truly believe in this life we have lead, one in which the world has been frozen solid but for us. CW-7 shot into the sky untested on such a massive scale and the winter that followed within the day cemented my fears. We were trying to save you, the representatives of the lower class, the infirm, the poor, the homeless.” Here  he paused to gaze around the room shocked silent by his words.

“Wilford, our conductor on this adventure, was only able to contact me a month into our journey, and I won’t burden you with the how and wherefore, but when he reached me with the news that the sudden Winter had passed as quickly as it came we were struck with a divine opportunity—” Gilliam held up a hand as several in the crowd looked poised to respond, "Please let me continue. You see, there are many questions in our modern era about humanity and its nature that can only be guessed at, not controlled or measured but here, oh here." His voice, usually so soft and strong, began to race with excitement,"This Train, from tail to engine, is a perfect ecosystem, closed from outside influence of all kinds. Every human on board acts as if they were the only humans alive." Gilliam broke into a smile," and this is what they do, they will kill, they will consume, but they will also give and fight! Do you not see what we have proven here?”

Curtis wished he could say he had never seen this look in Gilliam’s eyes but he had, during his lectures, in the late nights they spent together planning an uprising that would finally succeed. He had raised Edgar with that smile and Grey had lived his life serving it. At this Curtis found his voice, raised against Gilliam for the first time.

“What have you done?”

The phrase is hissed and the sentiment is met and buoyed by the one hundred other scarred souls trapped within the tail of the train.

But Gilliam only smiled serenely and replied, "I have proven your humanity."

**Author's Note:**

> Hope everyone enjoyed this, it's my first fan fiction in years. Also, there is a Slaughterhouse Five reference in there, kudos if you found it! :)


End file.
